Time Travelers: Photographs

Can a photograph open a portal to another world? Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection presents a selection of extraordinary works that each offer entry into a moment in photography’s history. These objects transport viewers across geographic and temporal distances, or into spaces constructed entirely within the boundaries of a photographic print.

Reflecting a multitude of styles, approaches, and processes, the works in this exhibition date from photography’s earliest years to our present moment, ranging from William Henry Fox Talbot’s investigations with the nascent technology in the mid-1800s to JoAnn Verburg’s immersive representation of the natural landscape in the early 21st century. Some photographs in the exhibition were made for scientific purposes, or to mark a significant event, while others—including those by Julia Margaret Cameron and Edward Steichen—assert the medium as a means of artistic creation. Portraits made under diverse circumstances illuminate the complexities of representing the self and others, while experiments in the image, like those by László Moholy-Nagy and Jan Groover, explore photography’s unique modes of vision.

Honoring a generous gift of photographs to MoMA from Robert F. Greenhill in memory of his wife, Gayle Greenhill, Time Travelers invites extended contemplation of these objects and the stories they carry. Its photographs offer encounters with people, things, and events outside our own place and time, in the spirit of photographer Emmet Gowin’s avowal, “For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website